Frank Lampard SLAMS Todd Boehly for ruining Chelsea

Carlo Garganese

• 13 Mar 2024 10:38 GMT
• 4 min read

Chelsea legend Frank Lampard has slammed Todd Boehly, blaming the Blues owner for the club’s struggles on the pitch.

Boehly assumed ownership of Chelsea in 2022 from Roman Abramovich and has since spent over €1 billion on transfers.

Despite this record-breaking outlay, Chelsea’s results on the pitch have been nothing short of a disaster.

They finished 12th in the Premier League in the 2022-23 season and are now eleventh in the table this campaign, having won no trophies.

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Chelsea have also been through five different managers under Boehly, with Mauricio Pochettino now under pressure and at risk of the sack before the summer.

But former Chelsea midfield legend Lampard - who also returned as caretaker manager at the end of last season - says it is wrong to blame the coach.

Instead, Lampard believes that Boehly is the man to blame for Chelsea’s problems and says that his youth-driven transfer policy has not worked.

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What did Lampard say?

"I said it quite a lot when I was there and people threw it back at me, I was like: 'Standards have not been good enough here'. You have to have a level of standards to be a top club. Forget about the tactics of the layer on top, things below have to be right to perform, and I didn't see it there," Lampard told the Unfiltered podcast.

"Now, I think in the summer, to be fair, players moved on, some rightfully so for them and for the club, and new players came in. So, I think that probably would have freshened up the feel in pre-season for the new manager... But in my opinion it was going to be a challenge again to keep moving forward quickly like people would expect, and that's proven the case.

"So I think you should be careful to point fingers at the manager himself or point fingers at maybe a young player that's trying to find form in the team that hasn't really got an experienced spine there that they can rely on and look up to certain players.

“The strategy has been to bring in young players, you've got young kids coming over at 21 from another country, trying to fit into a team. I'm not saying 'in my day' but in my day when you bring in those younger players, they sit themselves on the bench or they train alongside and watch how competitive training is. They watch a Drogba and how they trained or watch a John Terry and how he leads the club and they learn and then they get to the team or they don't come through at Cheslea.

“To ask a lot of players to do that at the same time and develop is not an easy thing. So I think be very careful, I think the strategy of course will be questioned, and I think there have been things done that you kind of look now and ask if it could have been different, yes."

Chelsea have focused most of their €1bn transfer recruitment on talented youngsters but the vast majority have failed to live up to expectations so far.